April 17, 2017

POSTMODERNISM, THEN AND NOW:

Shot:

Pilate’s dilemma is captured in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, a brilliant and bizarre film that is at once a genuine work of piety and one degree shy of being a genuine work of pornography. Hristo Shopov’s beleaguered Pilate invokes that most 21st-century of phrases: “my truth.” He explains to his wife that he is in an impossible position: The Jewish authorities will cause trouble if he does not condemn Jesus, while Jesus’s followers may revolt if he does. Either way there will be bloodshed, and the emperor has warned him that if Judea isn’t kept pacified, the blood shed will be Pilate’s own. “Ecce est mea veritas!” he says. “That is my truth!”

The Pilate of the Gospels maintains a higher degree of equanimity. When Jesus speaks to him of truth, he famously asks, “What is truth?”